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Okay. That was routing
protocols .
This chapter, as much as any other, should give you a more in-depth
knowledge of how the Internet works. So, as
a bit of fun, let’s do a little bit of crystal ball looking, and
try and predict where the Internet will evolve in 10 or 20 years
in the future.
Most people
are well aware of the disappearing computer, well, in fact, it has
almost disappeared. The only reason that we still see computers,
it that they still require large screens, and keyboards, and floppy
disks, and so on. The actual physical size of the electronics is
small. For example a high-performance microprocessor has
a silicon size of less than one inch square. The next
step from the disappearing computer is the disappearing Internet
, where the interface to the Internet is invisible
to the user.
So what are
the things that are holding back this development:
·
The Internet and
its addressing structure were never really
designed to be a global infrastructure and
is constraining the access to resources and information .
·
Information and
databases tend to be static , and fixed
to location.
·
Difficult to group individual
objects into larger objects.
·
Difficult to add resources to
the Internet (requires an ISP and a valid IP
address ).
·
Search engines are not very
good at gathering relevant information .
On the WWW , typically users get
pages of irrelevant information, which just happens to have the
keyword which they are searching for.
·
Resources are gathered around
local servers .
·
Resources are tied to locations
with an IP address .
·
IP address
es are not logically organized.
·
Infrastructure of the Internet
requires complex routing.
So where are we now, and
where will we be in the future:
|
Now
|
Future
|
|
Computers use IP addresse s,
which require complex routing
|
Virtually
every object in the world can be addressed
|
|
Location
of resources is tied to networks
|
Resources
and objects can move
|
|
Movement
of resources requires specialist configuration
|
Automatic
tracking of resources
|
|
Difficult
to add objects onto the Internet (normally requires
an IP address and a network adaptor)
|
Easy
to add objects onto the Internet (done automatically)
|
|
Difficult
to address resources, which tend to be fixed in their location
|
Objects
become real, and do not have a fixed location
|
In the future many objects will have their own address,
and can thus be addressed over the Internet .
This will require that each object has a unique ID, that will map
to a network address (which is built up from a geographical addressing
structure). This is similar to the way that each network
adaptor has a MAC address ,
which is mapped to a network address (its IP address
).
The MAC address does not contain any information on
the location of the object, but the network address does.
© W.
Buchanan, 2000
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